Freedom of Speech Is Now Largely an Illusion | Hacker News Reader

Freedom of Speech Is Now Largely an Illusion

blog.dilbert.com

20 pointsgukov34 comments

Walled garden platforms are a joke. If you need to get your messaging out reliably you would host your own infrastructure (Gnu social/mastodon, et cetera).

If you can solve the problem of getting an audience onto GNU Social . . .

Pointing out the problems of closed platforms and some alternatives is a good start. The likes of Scott Adams, Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins would be well placed to help attain critical mass.

> Best of all, it makes people like me look like conspiracy nuts. ... I won’t ask you to believe me about Twitter’s backdoor assault on the First Amendment.

You are a conspiracy nut, Mr Adams. Twitter is a private company. Repeat: Twitter is a private company. It's not even nominally working in your name (like a democratic government is). The First Amendment says nothing about private entities. Just because every TV news show uses it as a lazy source of react quotes does not make it a neutral public service.

Again, twitter is not a public service. Twitter owes you nothing; you haven't paid it fees/taxes. It's also a terrible place to discuss nuanced concepts (which is most concepts). Twitter is also not the only place you can express yourself.

The more I read of Scott Adams' recent murmurings, the more respect I lose for him.

Strictly true in the context of "first amendment".

But what I've realised recently is that "free speech" is more than just a legal right conferred by the government, it's a social climate. The climate of free speech is even more important than the government right, because if the climate is lost then people will start demanding that the government abolish the legal right too.

A social climate of free speech means a society in which people are accustomed to hearing things they find disagreeable, and don't flip out every time they do.

It means that although people hypothetically can punish each other for views they find disagreeable by means such as boycotting their businesses or shouting at them when they try to speak, they manage to refrain from doing so in all but the most egregious half a percent of cases, and generally tolerate disagreement.

This is what we're in danger of losing at the moment, and if this is lost then the legal right can't be far behind.

If that's the argument, then I still say "fuck Adams". He's defending someone for whom there's multiple video evidence of him stomping on people's rights to speak freely and ask questions. Yesterday someone showed me a video of a man being removed from the room for asking a question.

And looking over Adams' backlog, he's faking news: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156711454356/president-trump-an... > "I don't know what was in those phone calls, but Australia and Mexico were lecturing Trump, and Trump let them know who was king, booyah!". Actually, no. The Australian PM went to Trump cap-in-hand, asking him to maintain an existing bargain. He couldn't afford to get Trump offside because the call was about a very explosive issue back home, and the existing bargain was his 'out' from it. He was pilloried here at home because he didn't stand up to Trump when the content of the call was made public. But no, Adams just makes shit up and decides "fuck those guys", defending a demagogue who does the same. Free speech does not include a right to lie about others (see libel/slander).

The climate of erosion of free speech is not most threatened by Twitter, it's the current US administration and their fact-blind supporters like Adams that's the real risk.

Then why so much hullabaloo about fake news in Facebook? They are a private company and surely they can show anything to their users?

Also I don't think you'd be as nonchalant if Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders were being banned by Twitter.

I thought the big issue with "fake news" (which seemingly a buzzword for an old concept, but that's another discussion) was that people shared them in the first place, therefore distributing them without realising they were not genuine.

I hadn't read anything about Facebook themselves being complicit in some sort of syndicate to spread misinformation during the election.

Firstly, I would be as nonchalant if Warren or Sanders were being filtered (Adams isn't banned) by Twitter... because... as I say, Twitter is not a public service. If you're going to be angry about Twitter filtering Adams, you should be angry at HN for flagging this article. You should be using this opportunity to educate people about Twitter not being a public service, and how news services that use it for react quotes are doing everyone a disservice (have you noticed now how react quotes these days come from strangers on Twitter, not people near the actual event in question?)

As for Facebook - Facebook already filtered your feed, independent of the 'fake news' thing.

Small nit: I'm blessedly largely ignorant of Twitter and all of this hullabaloo, though one difference I suspect in moderation is that any flagging of this submission was the result of user action as opposed to any action taken by a mod.

I don't think that there's all that much difference between a mod doing it and the relatively small number of userbase flags doing it.

Hell, if userbase flagging was available in Twitter like on HN, no-one with a household name would ever be able to use it, regardless of whether or not they were even political...

I think in the case of your analogy it does. In one, the argument seems to be that a central authority is censoring users. In the other, it's a community enforcing its standards.

One can argue that there are potential problems in either case, but I think the nature of the problems are slightly, but importantly different.

"we cant say anything anymore" blah blah blah.

Try and post a anti trump comment on breitbart.com

Breitbart makes no claim to be a general platform for discussion. It is openly a place with a particular bent.

Nobody is complaining about conservatives being banned from Democratic Underground, they're complaining about conservatives being banned from twitter and facebook.

Correlation is not causality. The people getting banned from twitter are Republicans, but that is not necessarily why they are being banned. I'm sure you can find lots of alternative correlates with the kinds of profiles which are banned from twitter.

Whereas on Breitbart you are explicitly banned for dissent, on twitter, there is only correlation.

I'm curious. Presumably 'you' implies that dissenting comments are banned? Is there evidence to suggest this is an editorial policy? If it is, senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos has some difficult questions to answer.

On the other hand, any publication with an angle will favor comments supporting that view simply because this is good for circulation and thereby survival. As an exception to this, I might mention WUWT, the sceptical climate site. You can find many (or at least a reasonable showing of) comments dissenting strongly from a pro-sceptic article.

As a corporate old guy I'll never forget Adams Lucent logo ,er coffee stain. [0]

There were many favorites.

So can someone give me the 4 lines of what a comic strip millionaire did after electrons took over paper?

Is Scott Adams still relevant. I've not heard his name for a decade.

[0] http://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Brown+Ring+Of+Qualit...

He said, unafraid.

He is unafraid. He's rich and his livelihood is not threatened. He's got an audience already and being banned from twitter wouldn't affect his livelihood much. And he doesn't live in Berkeley so he's unlikely to get his head smashed in, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's had to increase his security measures anyway.

Scott Adams has some pretty crazy, extremist things to say. Recently someone else quoted a couple of them and was flagged and criticized by a moderator for provoking a flame war (the only inflammatory comments in the post were Adams'). I think the credibility of the speaker is very important to any topic, but I'm not sure how to address it here.

Extremist is ... not useful. Yes he supports (not 100% even) Trump, but extremist ? Be serious.

I think the point of the article is that twitter is randomized shadowbanning (visible to 1% or so of people who explicitly look at his account actually see his posts) based on political viewpoints.

He is extremist. Again, it's clear from the moderators that quoting his extremist statements is undesireable, but it limits our conversation.

You can find the quotes in this discussion if you know how to look:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13604551

Quotes can be used for different purposes. I suspect that you can use a quote in a civil, constructive way as an example, though it might just be better to find a reference to point to.

In the case you're referring to here, the commenter was intentionally bringing up an inflammatory quote to discredit the parent comment, taking the thread completely off track from what had been a relatively civil discussion, which is what the mod pointed out (as did other commenters in the thread).

If I'm ever unsure about the source, I just go down to the comments to see the bias and signal/noise ratio.

Funny how supporting the democratically elected president is considered extreme.

Not what I meant. See here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13647807

"Now"

Hmm, I've seen this phenomenon before. I wonder if it has to do with popularity and tweet load?

For some definition of freedom of speech, this is and has always been true. You've never had the right to be heard, only the right to speak.

Would you have said the same thing to Martin Luther King in the 60s? Or to the abolitionists during the 19th century?

Where were you when the media was interrupting coverage of Bernie's 20k+ rallies and switching to Trump's random word salad?

It's a standard right-wing persecution complex combined with projection.

Yes, of course! Even MLK in all his excellence did not have the right to have his speeches printed verbatim in every newspaper in the country for free. That's not what free speech is.

Wow, I'm really depressed by the comments here. Looks like the HN liberals are ready to ban any conservative views. This goes on to confirm my belief that the left hates freedom of speech.

A person looked only for evidence which confirmed their existing beliefs and felt vindicated. Divergent from reality and confident of their unquestioned positions they began to share the delusion with others.

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